Mighty Marvel Monday! This Week’s Theme: Marvel + Women

Another Monday, another edition of Mighty Marvel Monday! All (some) of the Marvel-related news (links) from the last week (or so) fit to print (post electronically).

Today’s theme: Marvel and Women.

As is typical of Marvel, this week Marvel took a giant step forward, and another giant step backwards.

Let’s go with the good news first.

On Friday, Marvel announced the “Ant-Man Micro-Tech Challenge,” which is a pretty cool sounding challenge, but is made even cooler (or potentially more ironic considering the absence of Janet Van Dyne in the Ant-Man movie) in that entry is limited to high school girls ages 14-18. Evangeline Lilly, who plays Hope Van Dyne in the Ant-Man film, promos the challenge here, and the official website is here.

So…that’s the yay. Yay for Marvel supporting teenage girls. Yay for Marvel supporting teenage girls + STEM. There is much yay to be found here.

Other sites are hailing this as a mark of progressiveness, since The Ancient One is male in the comics. Whether Tilda would play the role as male, female, or some mix of both and/or neither is certainly part of the appeal of the casting, but that is far outweighed by the fact that The Ancient One is Asian, and specifically, Tibetan. Period, end of sentence.

It is a tenet of intersectional feminism that progress made at the expense of less privileged groups should not be considered progress, so no matter how cool I think Tilda Swinton is, I cannot support her casting.

One more news item that found its way onto my radar (i.e. my Marvel Google alert) was this piece about 1970s Marvel comics and feminism: “Night Nurse: love, duty and feminist thinking in early 1970s Marvel Comics” is the kind of feminist analysis I like to see out in the world of comics journalism. The author, male, admits his privilege and position when he describes the male gaze being at work by having the female protagonists drawn in their underwear for no apparent reason, and also questions, as many women already have, why the female superheroes who appear in the “modernized” story are empowered only through violence. Kudos, Mr. Jamieson.

ICYMI

I may have been less than kind when I called out Hot Topic, Torrid, and Her Universe for failing to deliver their promised Avengers clothing line in plus sizes in an equitable manner, but this past week, We Love Fine rolled out a new Spider-Gwen clothing line. Although not all the clothing is not yet released, it is all available for pre-order, and available through 3x.